No Parking

At today’s meeting somebody again raised the issue of parking spaces on campus. Our staff parking area is constantly intruded upon by students, contractors, visitors, etc. who park indiscriminately in our parking spaces and on both sides of the access lane. The security officers are either incapable or unwilling to take action.

The problem is fairly easy to solve, if only you resolve to do it. I wrote about it over three years ago but think it’s time for a revisit.

First, we start by having an audit of parking facilities on campus to see exactly how many parking spaces there are. For illustration, let’s say that there are 1,000 on them. Then, we allocate out of the 1,000 parking spaces for staff and other university employees (say 500) and visitors (say 100). Not all university employees need to be allocated parking spaces, but I would say that each academic staff should be assigned one as needed.

Parking aversion by Zneak at deviantART

What to do with the remaining 400 is where it gets interesting. The university can auction off all or some of them for maximum revenue. If auctioning is too “capitalistic”, we can sell long-term parking permits instead. Those who opt not to buy parking permits, like visitors, can be charged hourly or daily rates. I don’t see that there is any obligation for the university to provide free parking to students. Free parking is not a necessity, particularly when most students are offered on-campus housing and the university is regularly serviced by buses. With the government cutting down funding, the university can definitely use the extra income.

The second part is enforcement. One way, we can tell campus security to buck up. I doubt they’ll ever step up though, being understaffed and overworked as they are. The biggest problem now is people parking their vehicles where they aren’t supposed to. The existing method of enforcement, by either issuing summonses or clamping the offending vehicles, doesn’t seem to work. In fact, I think that it is stupid to clamp vehicles found to be parked haphazardly and obstructing traffic, so they cannot be moved. The better alternative is to tow them away.

We can contract tow truck operators to carry away vehicles that violate parking rules, of course at the expense of the owners. Since the tow trucks get paid for each vehicle they tow away, motivating them won’t be a problem. Again, the university can take a cut of the towing charges. It is one thing to get to your car and find a parking ticket or have it clamped; something else to find it gone, towed away. I’m sure nobody will dare violate parking rules after having their car towed away once.

Now, aren’t we glad I am not running the university?